I was born under the sign "Obstetrics"

Posts Tagged osx

So I bought a new (old) Mac Pro; late 2009, 12/24 core, 64GB, NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512 MB. It’s running macOS 10.12.3 Sierra. I hooked up one monitor to the HDMI port, and one to the DVI port. Seemed to work fine.

Until I rebooted the machine.

Then it refused to show the mouse pointer (Apple magic mouse), although It would warn of the mouse’s disconnect and reconnect if I powered the mouse up and down. Likewise, there was no response to the keyboard. It just sat there showing login options for me and a guest; it wouldn’t respond to anything at all I did with mouse or keyboard.

After trying power downs, pulling the plug for a while, pounding on the keyboard, powering the mouse up and down, I finally thought to pull a connection to a monitor. Specifically, the DVI-connected monitor. Immediately the mouse pointer showed up, and I was able to log in.

Up to this point, I had the machine set up so that the HDMI monitor was on the left, and was my home (boot screen) monitor. That’s the one you drag the menu bar to in the Prefs / Displays panel. But I noticed when the machine booted, it showed up on the DVI monitor first, then the HDMI monitor, and then it locked up.

So, still booted up after all this screwing around, I swapped monitor cables, then set the DVI monitor to be the home monitor, as the left monitor was now my DVI-connected monitor instead of my HDMI-connected monitor.

Now the machine restarts cleanly, or at least, it has a few times in a row.

So if you’re having this kind of problem, after the login screen shows, try pulling one or the other or both of the monitor cables to see if it will unlock the mess. And make sure the DVI monitor is your home monitor once you get things running again.

Because I develop Software Defined Radio (SDR) software, I have occasion to connect, and disconnect, various network devices to my wired network in order to test them all day long. Most of the SDRs are designed to configure using DHCP, or can be convinced to do so. That saves some fooling around, and is a good thing. However, my network is extensive, devices are always being moved around, WiFi devices arriving and leaving, and so once the SDRs are assigned an IP, I have to go hunt them down. It was annoying that they’re always showing up somewhere different.

Recently, I had a friend, a serious Linux aficionado, come over and we had occasion to sit in front of my machine while I was doing some console work. I do a lot of work under OS X using the GUI, and previously that is what had been on-screen when he had visited. This time, however, I had some consoles open to one of my web servers.

I did a few things during which he was uncharacteristically silent. During a pause in my typing, he spoke up with a note of real interest: “That’s unbelievably awesome. What is that?”

As they train to become a doctor, new interns are taught about many different diseases that produce various sets of otherwise similar symptoms. In conjunction with this new and complex knowledge, they are also taught this truism: “When you hear hoofprints, you must not initially assume a zebra is in the vicinity.” This pithy remark is meant to impart that, for instance, if a patient comes in bleeding from an orifice, one must not immediately assume that Ebola is in the building; more likely something much more common is in play, such as hemorrhoids or perhaps an unfortunate excess of enthusiasm coupled with a new, ahem, toy.

One of the clearer signs that I was becoming a competent programmer was that the problems in my code began, more and more often, to in fact, be zebras. Instead of a misplaced character or a missing clause or some kind of blatant conceptual error, the abject weirdnesses that were most often populating the realm of my final, demonstrably accurate diagnoses came to be things like operating system bugs, broken libraries, incomplete emulations and exotic compiler bugs. Zebras.Read the rest of this entry »

This version: Changes the behavior of the shifted cursor keys and the quick tune buttons at the top of the GUI such that the spectrum and waterfall will scroll when the demodulator bar approaches the span edges.

Also has new variable RF mute TCP command, rmute:X Y where X is either 0 (mute off) or 1 (mute on) and where Y varies from 0.0 (fully muted) to 1.0 (fully unmuted.) This allows you to drop the RF levels coming in any arbitrary amount for any reason. This is not sticky; on restart, rmute is set to 0 and 1.0.

pple announced a new Mac Pro today; twice as fast as the current model, which itself is faster than the one I presently own. But that’s all they did. Announce it. It’s not ready, there’s no date, there’s no price, and other than “faster” and “supports three, 4k displays” and “much smaller footprint”, there isn’t much other information either.

Sigh.

On other fronts, they’ve finally fixed the multi-monitor shortcomings in OSX; menus, full screen apps, etc. Kudos. Even iOS got a little love with folders that can hold many files, instead of just a few.

The new OSX makes me willing to go for a new Mac Pro, or at least, it seems that way with the limited information I have now. I can put the old fella up in the ham shack where it will do a fine job with the SDR up there; and the new hotness will (of course) drive my desktop, save me time on compiles and just about anything else… and I admit, I run my SDR from my desk even more often than I do in my ham shack. Not just testing, I like the sound of a radio in the background.

The question is, newest model that can only run three displays and has only a small internal SSD? Or the current generation that can do more displays and has room for standard internal HDs?

Apple really does test my patience. It’s been several years since they really gave the Mac Pro much attention, and frankly, I was getting close to building a Hackintosh or buying the current generation. Will they get the Mac Pro out in time? Should I go for newness, the current generation, hacking, or something used off EBay? I feel information-deprived.

Ever run into this one? Under Leopard (OSX 10.5.8), the above message is posted to the system console every time cron launches a process. If you use cron for anything and the console for anything, this can be very, very annoying. Apple’s known about the problem for years, and has done nothing. Since I fall into that class of folks who use both the console and cron, I’ve been more or less quietly steaming about it. I finally decided to do something about it. Be warned; the following is technical and to-the-metal hackery. Don’t try this at home unless you’re very confident in your skill(z).

Now, as this hack is fairly specific to the problem, I don’t think it can hurt anything else (if performed correctly), and it serves my needs perfectly. Your mileage may differ for any number of reasons, and if you’re not a technical person, you should stop reading now and just forget your ever saw this post. Really. Stop now.Read the rest of this entry »